There has been a major upgrade to publicdata.eu (shown below), a cross-European data portal which collects records together in one place from data catalogues throughout the EU. The site is run by the Open Knowledge Foundation as part of the LOD2 project. It is based on CKAN, the OKF’s open-source data portal software, used to run national data portals such as data.gov.uk, and is the first site up and running with the code that will form CKAN 2.0, due for release soon.
Personalisation
A significant new feature of CKAN 2.0 is its personalisation features, which allow you to ‘follow’ particular datasets, groups, and users. For example, logged-in users see a ‘Follow’ button when viewing a dataset. A dashboard with the activity and updates you’re interested in, as shown. Details of how the personalisation features work are likely to change, and feedback is welcome while we are working on it.
Linked data
Ivan Ermilov of the University of Leipzig, another LOD2 partner, has implemented a CSV to RDF converter that is integrated with publicdata.eu. This means that many datasets now have data available in RDF, the native format of Linked Data, in line with the whole aims of the LOD2 project. This addition means that the site does not only collect data from different European catalogues so that they can be searched together, but enhances them with RDF – opening up interesting possibilities for harvesting.
CKAN’s metadata records are themselves available in RDF and on publicdata.eu this is now exposed on the user interface, where each dataset page has buttons offering its metadata in RDF and JSON.
Read more
To read more about what has changed, including work on the user interface and to the harvesters, see this post on the CKAN blog.
